-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Miguel de Icaza wrote:
Hello folks,
Hi Miguel, thanks for answering, and good to see someone from the non-SUSE-Nürnberg branch of Novell involved into this (not that I have anything against them.. totally not actually ;D). @Marcus, of course my mail was near the red line of flamebait, and it was more or less on purpose (the questions I raised were valid though). IMO it's OK to sometimes shake the box a little to get something moving (note that there was no intent nor content to blame or criticize individuals).
I wanted to answer a few questions that folks have posed on the list. Am currently leading the Mono effort at Novell, but I happen to be on the same building where some of the desktop/Gnome guys live. You should not consider this email as authoritative, because I am not directly involved in the desktop group, but I share lunch with the guys and the usability lab is next to my office, so I tend to talk to them. So with this in mind:
Nothing authoritative here Miguel, we're part of the same (so I hope) community around SUSE Linux and just discussing here.
* Ximian and Gnome The Ximian group has not existed for a long time, it was split into various groups after the Novell acquisition, and they have merged, transformed and shifted into various areas. In the engineering area some guys went into ZenWorks management (the Red Carpet guys), some went to the desktop effort and some are part of Mono. In particular, I would like to point out that the effort is not really aimed at "Gnome" per se, but at the "Desktop". That is the important end goal, Gnome is merely one of the components of the desktop.
Good to see you write that. We'll remind you about it ;) (oops, just after saying it's not authoritative ;))
* Gnome version number 2.14 My impression is that the latest Gnome froze too late in the schedule for it to be incorporated into our SUSE distribution. I know that some of the important features and fixes in 2.14 were backported earlier to our version of 2.12 because we knew the dates would not work for us.
Absolutely agree. Feature freeze is the only way to manage distribution releases, and that isn't questioned at all, it's perfectly fine. After all, KDE 3.5.2 was released during the beta releases of 10.1 and it's understandable it wasn't upgraded for 10.1 final, both from technical/QA and organizational aspects. Nevertheless, while I'm totally aware that the supplementary builds are very low priority at Novell, my point can be summarized like this: 1) KDE 3.5.2 was released 2 weeks after GNOME 2.14 - yet, KDE 3.5.2 packages for SUSE Linux 10.1 were available a good week after the GM release (and packages were available for SL 10.0 a week or two after KDE 3.5.2 was released) 2) Other distributions, such as Fedora Core include GNOME 2.14, which is understandable as FC has been released after SL 10.1, but e.g. Ubuntu also provides GNOME 2.14 packages as an upgrade. Talking about "community guerrilla marketing", believe me that it's quite difficult to explain to end-users and potential SUSE Linux converts why those 2 distributions include the latest stable GNOME release but Novell doesn't provide an upgrade path as it does for KDE (and I do speak about _unsupported_ upgrades). I mean, Novell.. after buying Ximian and employing some of the most influential individuals in the GNOME community (just to name you and Robert Love), people would actually expect to have the best and most polished GNOME desktop of all Linux distributions. Unfortunately, today, that seems to be Ubuntu and not SUSE Linux. That's what I called a "ridiculous situation". At least it is to me. If I'm missing something or am totally wrong in my assumptions, I'd be grateful for clarification and/or correcting me. Those 2 points above and not seeing any of you guys involved into communication with the openSUSE.org community (*), sched a light of not really being interested in direct communication with us and solely being focused on GNOME, Mono or SLED/SLES. At least it does so to me (and I'm not the only one). Some points you raise further in your email are probably a good reason/explanation for this situation. (*) @Marcus: sorry, but developing software that's included into SUSE Linux and in SLES/SLED, and/or replying to bugzilla issues doesn't count, that's your everyday job and would be the case even if this openSUSE.org communication channel with the community wouldn't exist. I'm _not_ saying people must participate during their spare time, nor am I saying that Novell must tell those people to do so nor spend a considerable amount of time reading mailing-lists. I'm very aware of priorities and that those people are developers or project managers who have tasks, deadlines and commitments (I'm working as a system architect for a company that's 8 * Novell in terms of size, I know what that means). I'm just saying that it is an unfortunate situation and while we (sorry for speaking on behalf of many people, but I think it's accurate) are thankful and enjoying the ongoing efforts of the SUSE team in Nürnberg to take time to discuss with us, it would be beneficial to everyone to have at least a few people from other Linux-related Novell branches have an eye on e.g. this list. @Thomas H.: don't forget that we as a community are a very valuable asset for Novell, we're not less important from a strategic point of view than their developers (I mean if we were, they wouldn't have pushed openSUSE in the first place, wouldn't they). Don't put us down as just being an annoyance for the developers. While we (as a community) are having a benefit from a much more direct communication and, hopefully, more and more collaboration between the people working on SUSE Linux, the opposite is very true as well. That's the whole point in the first place, it's a "win-win" situation.
I know that the Desktop Group is working towards polishing, fixing, improving and tuning what will be the next enterprise product SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) which is a product that we have to maintain for a number of years (5, 7, I cant remember). So the focus has been in making sure that we do the best possible job for this distribution that we will be supporting for a very long time. As someone has pointed out on the list elsewhere, am sure that 2.14 will make it into the next iteration of OpenSUSE; But the team managing that is currently crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's to make sure SLED is as good as everyone hopes it will be.
Ok, I guess that's an explanation of why there isn't a GNOME 2.14 in supplementary (*) yet. It draws priorities towards the Build Service (**) and a more collaborative model with the community wrt packaging, as the current situation (polishing+fixing SLED 10) is a blocker for providing latest GNOME packages for at least two and a half months (no pun intended, just an observation). (*) http://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/GNOME/ (**) http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service
* The Desktop Group In general, the Desktop Group works on various areas: they do develop new software (Xgl, beagle, the new slab, open office macro support, F-Spot, Banshee, compiz) and they do extend and contribute to existing software extensively. We believe that a complete desktop is much more than just Gnome. The team is trying to put together a very comprehensive, and in my opinion, the most ambitious desktop release of a Linux desktop ever created. You might not see them actively posting on the list, but they are there, and if you are interested particularly on the Gnome angle, you can track some of their progress on a number of aggregators (Planet Gnome and Monologue come to mind) as well as the multitude of irc channels in irc.gnome.org devoted to specific projects (#banshee, #ipodsharp, #f-spot, #dashboard used for Beagle).
Sorry, can't resist: noticed that "it's much more than just GNOME", but all of the communication channels you just cited are all... GNOME ? ;)
Someone pointed out that I was in charge of Gnome; I am not directly involved in Gnome anymore. I work on Mono, and we work on Gtk# and developer tools like MonoDevelop which are only indirectly related to Gnome.
That was me. Seems I was wrong, but I think you're still a very vocal advocate and influential person wrt GNOME. Or not ? ;)
* Mailing lists
(note, here's what I'm relating to with "Some points you raise further in your email..." above)
I only found out today about this mailing list, am sure other guys are in the same boat. Some of the developers read this list, some do not. I do not know if there is a policy about this, and if there is, I do not know what it is.
I sure hope it isn't necessary to have a policy at Novell to have at least a very few people of e.g. the Desktop team have an eye on this list (and/or other opensuse-* lists) and contribute at times to threads that are of their interest (or ours (I mean the community)). If it does require some policy or management involvement, then at least it would be worth raising that issue (yes, I think it's an issue) over there. This list has become mid-traffic and would certainly take some time to be followed accurately on every topic. That's not really feasible, and no one is expecting nor demanding that. But I think that at least some threads here, on opensuse-factory or opensuse-packaging would benefit from their presence. Of course, the opposite is true as well, to be connected with the people that use, advocate, and work during their spare time to make SUSE Linux a better experience for everyone. ...
Maybe my group needs to pay more attention to the OpenSUSE list; I will certainly keep an eye for Mono-related issues on the list myself.
That would be very good indeed, both for you guys and for us.
Hope this clarifies some of the questions on the list,
It has certainly helped. Thanks Miguel, it's highly appreciated.
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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